Imaginary Folk

How Širom Reinvented Performance in a Pandemic Summer

If I ever forget what emerging from the deepest part of the pandemic felt like, I will turn to this film of the Slovenian band, Širom, touring their local countryside and playing to informal gatherings.

Filmed in the summer of 2021, when many of us were newly vaccinated, “Rural Underground” captures a moment layered with conflicting emotions: a lingering fear or at least trepidation of being in proximity with others, certainly, but also a yearning to connect, and an almost reborn sense of societal duties and pleasures. The break that the start of the pandemic introduced – for musicians, a total cessation of public performance – led those even in more regimented jobs to a rather free moment of reinvention. What is work, anyway? What is public, what is private? All of which, if you are a musician, might translate to: What is performance?

Širom, photo by Jože Balas

Širom, I imagine, were consciously engaged in fundamental questions like this well before COVID. A trio exploring what they themselves call “Imaginary Folk,” Širom are a kind of Incredible Things Band, making music from objects – a roll of packing tape, a bowl of raw rice – alongside homemade instruments, and even the occasional traditional device (violin, banjo, hurdy-gurdy, voice). Their earliest recordings, released in 2016, sound much like friends banging on anything and everything in a room, delighted at their surprising success making music from disparate noises. Form is accidental, it feels, on these first efforts, as everyone hangs on to whatever works for however long they can.

By their second album, “I Can Be A Clay Snapper” (2017), the group’s music is more constructed – there are tunes, of a loose kind, or at least themes that are introduced more clearly and then explored. The sounds are more controlled, and the devices – whether traditional or homemade – are used more deliberately. But the feeling of the invention of a vocabulary persists, as the trio discovers ways to orchestrate their improvisations.

Packing tape unrolled for audio effect, still from video of a festival performance at Le Guess Who, 2022

The album that followed, 2019’s “A Universe That Roasts Blossoms For A Horse,” feels like a realized group sound. This is a band with a clear vocabulary, a way of composing and arranging unique to themselves, and a confidence forged by widening experience with live performance as well as recording. The album has variety within its chosen parameters – the tracks are artfully sequenced, as well as composed. It’s a work fully deserving of the wider attention it started to attract.

And then the pandemic hit.

We were all hit, at whatever stage of life, by a wave of loss, cessation, disruption. Širom happened to be near the height of their powers as a band. What to do, now that there was nothing to do?

I don’t expect to ever feel nostalgia for that moment of collective trauma. But the next bit – what emerged from our strangely extended confusion, slowly, tentatively, in fits and starts – I believe has value, and it’s that part Širom documented on film. What we witness is the renewal of habits that are no longer habits. Gatherings where no one knows how to gather. Public performances that are no longer public, and may not even be performances.

Still from one of the afterparty scenes in Rural Underground

Širom have surely always pushed toward fundamentals - that’s the “folk” aspect of their music. But they also work hard to clear away expectation, rejecting accepted forms - that’s the “imaginary” part of the label they have chosen for themselves. At an avant-garde festival, we might see that combination in Širom’s music as abstract, even difficult. But in the summer of 2021, traveling to rural places carrying their bizarre accoutrements like a circus, the function of their work seems different from simply being a band on tour. Yes, there is a traditional role for entertainers in a rural landscape. But are Širom entertaining? I don’t see that in the document. I see them driving up to diffuse gatherings – as permanent as a commune or as temporary as a party – and galvanizing each of them into a social structure. Their actions as musicians create the social moment no one remembered how to make. People there have varied reactions – they smile, they look lost in thought, they are bored or entranced – but time and again we see people freshly sharing space. After Širom’s performances, these groups seem released from some kind of paralysis. They drink, they burn fires, they are joyful or melancholic, but most strikingly they are together.

We will forget these moments of social reinvention, I know. We already have, largely, as a new normal takes hold for gatherings of all kinds including music performance. People are buying tickets again for shows previewed online and anticipated as events with predictable parameters. And already I can feel a creeping yearning for something other, something alien and yet deeply familiar or even primal. Something documented by Širom’s rural wanderings in the summer of 2021.

Happily, the album by Širom that developed alongside these mystical rural performances, “The Liquified Throne of Simplicity” (2022), is their recorded masterwork thus far. It is an ambitious, double LP. And its opening, the twenty-minute “Wilted Superstition Engaged in Copulation” - anchored by a newfound rhythmic solidity – might be their “Mother Sky,” a signature track that contains all the magic of this band. If you give it the time and space, it will transport you. Maybe not to the Slovenian countryside of 2021. But in that miraculous way of great recordings, it could take you places you already inhabit.

Listening to: Under an Endless Sky, by Dorothy Moskowitz & The United States of Alchemy

Cooking: Rice gruel for a friend recovering from illness